Parents as reading role models
I read this article quite a while ago on the website of a great Sydney bookstore called Gleebooks. I hope they don't mind me reprinting it here. I do recommend people use their online services if they want to save money sending heavy parcels of books back to Australia on birthdays and other occasions so look them up at www.gleebooks.com.au soon. Now, here's the article:
"Over the last few years of teaching at universities I have conducted a poll amongst my students. I ask how many of them were read to as children. I then ask them if they can describe for me the first image they can recall from a book. I tell them of my image.
My past and present students are creative writers; budding poets, novelists and/or literary critics. The results are stacked I guess. But roughly eight out of ten students were read to by both or one of their parents. I do not question the others any further. Literacy is not a sign of goodness or worthiness and many literate people find reading aloud uncomfortable. I do however recommend to the 'read to's' that they pick up some whiskey on the way home for Dad and flowers for Mum, or the other way around depending on what tempos, what structures govern their domestic lives.
The subjective response to a work of art is not commonly regarded as a 'true' form of criticism, but for a creative writer and a creative reader it may provide clues to the sources of your own mind. (Try it at home, with or without adult supervision. What is your earliest memory of a book?). The gut response is informed certainly by genetics, environment, amount of alcohol consumed prior to the act of engagement etc... Consider, though, that Nabokov said we read with our spines, awaiting the telltale tingle between the shoulder blades. Consider Marianne Moore's definition of poetry as … imaginary gardens with real toads.
My students are incredibly responsive to the question, it is almost possible to observe the connections, synapse to synapse, being retraced in their own minds, to see memory at work. Some remember red tugboats, others popguns, goblins and witches. The memory is translated into speech, often breathlessly.
I ask them then to tell me why every culture tells stories and why stories of monsters and gods and the foolish and the greedy are repeated in all cultures? We are all children of storytelling cultures, our lives are moored to stories, whether they be written or oral, epic or anecdotal, sung or sermonised. We are all, of course, 'read to' as children.
How long has it been since you read a book to a child? How long has it been since you were read to, how long since you re-read your favourite book from childhood, how long since you read as a child? Can you remember that tingle of childhood when the story scared or lulled you into dream, when the resonances could be seen in a cobweb of your home, in the alley behind your house, or behind the cupboard door, real beds with imaginary trolls beneath.
When, as a student, I was first asked to recall my earliest remembered image from a book, I remembered a golliwog with a lollipop. My lecturer at the time then asked me to consider why I might have retained that image for twenty-odd years. I thought about it over days, over weeks, over the seas and back again, and then, in one moment I slipped through the looking-glass into my own head. I remembered - though I cannot tell you the title of the book, whether it is famous or popular or obscure and out of print - I remembered that the golliwog was given the lollipop to exclude him from a game, to quieten him in a corner, whilst the real fun was had elsewhere. The lollipop was not a reward but a punishment for difference, a pay-off. And though I could not see him in my mind's eye, I knew that my migrant father had read that book to me and I knew, I remembered, finding comfort in the sorrow of that story and in the voice of the reader."
Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is go where they can find you.
Winnie the Pooh
Christopher Cyrill is a novelist and fiction editor
of Heat magazine.
"Over the last few years of teaching at universities I have conducted a poll amongst my students. I ask how many of them were read to as children. I then ask them if they can describe for me the first image they can recall from a book. I tell them of my image.
My past and present students are creative writers; budding poets, novelists and/or literary critics. The results are stacked I guess. But roughly eight out of ten students were read to by both or one of their parents. I do not question the others any further. Literacy is not a sign of goodness or worthiness and many literate people find reading aloud uncomfortable. I do however recommend to the 'read to's' that they pick up some whiskey on the way home for Dad and flowers for Mum, or the other way around depending on what tempos, what structures govern their domestic lives.
The subjective response to a work of art is not commonly regarded as a 'true' form of criticism, but for a creative writer and a creative reader it may provide clues to the sources of your own mind. (Try it at home, with or without adult supervision. What is your earliest memory of a book?). The gut response is informed certainly by genetics, environment, amount of alcohol consumed prior to the act of engagement etc... Consider, though, that Nabokov said we read with our spines, awaiting the telltale tingle between the shoulder blades. Consider Marianne Moore's definition of poetry as … imaginary gardens with real toads.
My students are incredibly responsive to the question, it is almost possible to observe the connections, synapse to synapse, being retraced in their own minds, to see memory at work. Some remember red tugboats, others popguns, goblins and witches. The memory is translated into speech, often breathlessly.
I ask them then to tell me why every culture tells stories and why stories of monsters and gods and the foolish and the greedy are repeated in all cultures? We are all children of storytelling cultures, our lives are moored to stories, whether they be written or oral, epic or anecdotal, sung or sermonised. We are all, of course, 'read to' as children.
How long has it been since you read a book to a child? How long has it been since you were read to, how long since you re-read your favourite book from childhood, how long since you read as a child? Can you remember that tingle of childhood when the story scared or lulled you into dream, when the resonances could be seen in a cobweb of your home, in the alley behind your house, or behind the cupboard door, real beds with imaginary trolls beneath.
When, as a student, I was first asked to recall my earliest remembered image from a book, I remembered a golliwog with a lollipop. My lecturer at the time then asked me to consider why I might have retained that image for twenty-odd years. I thought about it over days, over weeks, over the seas and back again, and then, in one moment I slipped through the looking-glass into my own head. I remembered - though I cannot tell you the title of the book, whether it is famous or popular or obscure and out of print - I remembered that the golliwog was given the lollipop to exclude him from a game, to quieten him in a corner, whilst the real fun was had elsewhere. The lollipop was not a reward but a punishment for difference, a pay-off. And though I could not see him in my mind's eye, I knew that my migrant father had read that book to me and I knew, I remembered, finding comfort in the sorrow of that story and in the voice of the reader."
Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is go where they can find you.
Winnie the Pooh
Christopher Cyrill is a novelist and fiction editor
of Heat magazine.
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